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If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise visit to A&E

20 January 2017, 21:00

At this time of year, squirrels are sometimes reduced to unfreezing their nuts by blowing on them.

Unless, that is, they have discovered that us wobbly, slow moving, ground dwelling meat sacks have all the food they need, and we will not put up a fight when challenged for it.

Some of the fattest squirrels in the country are now so bold that they have started attacking humans for their dinner.

It was predicable that eventually animals were not going to be satisfied with what nature provides and would start to have designs on what us corpulent humans eat, and find that we are not so big and tough after all.

And when the word goes round that we can't defend ourselves against squirrels, what do you think foxes are going to do?

Or cows for that matter? We lead them all passive and pliant to their slaughter; when they get the idea that we won't fight back, we'll get trampled under foot.

In Cornwall, squirrels have had their fill of foraging and have discovered that much tastier fare is carried by people.

When they staged an attack, it left a three-year-old boy needing hospital treatment.

Mother Sophie Renouf, 23, and her little son Finley were spending a pleasant afternoon in the countryside when they were charmed by the appearance of one of the Britain's cutest fauna.

The child proffered it a snack, whereupon the nightmare started. As though in a horror story by Beatrix Potter, while the mother and child were being charmed by the lead squirrel, a gang of half a dozen of them stormed out of the undergrowth and staged an all-out attack.

Ms Renouf, said: 'There was literally one squirrel there and my son, as you would, fed him as usual.

'Next thing, six of them came running out of the hedge and then, all of a sudden, all I remember is him screaming and there was blood pouring out of his hand.'

He was spirited to the hospital and medics spent three hours treating his puncture wounds and bandaging his fingers.

Three hours medical attention after a squirrel attack!

His mother now wants to warn others about the dangers of feeding wild squirrels.

That does not go far enough. There are dangers everywhere. People think that walking through some areas of our big cities are perilous, but they are as nothing compared to the terrors that abound in the thickets and hedgerows of rural Britain.